January 24, 2013 — In addition to this week's NewsBreak(s), the editors have compiled the Weekly News Digest, featuring stories from the week just past that you should know about. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.

Kno, Inc., a provider of education software, launched Kno Me, a personal study dashboard that helps students measure their engagement with each Kno eTextbook they use. Students can check in frequently to see near-real-time stats on their study behavior, interaction levels, time management, and personal progress. And with Kno Me social sharing, students can opt in to share their results with peers and even follow the engagement levels of other classmates (perhaps the best student in the class). Students decide what they will share.

The study insights available from Kno Me are based on Kno’s proprietary analytics platform, including the average time a student spends interacting with the textbook and time within specific chapters, the percentage of pages in the chapter the student annotates, and the percentage of glossary terms the student has mastered. Kno Me is available on all Kno interactive textbooks for iPad, Windows 8, and web browsers and will soon be available for Android and Windows 7.

Kno offers interactive textbooks for K-12 and higher education students. At Kno.com, students can find more than 200,000 digital titles from 65 leading textbook publishers. Kno’s digital textbooks provide more than 70 interactive features that are designed to increase learning efficiencies and engagement, saving students up to 90 minutes a week in study time per book.

Source: Kno, Inc.

HighWire Press to Include e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection

Duke University Press and HighWire Pressannounced a major expansion of their partnership to include the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Beginning with the 2014 collection, e-Duke Books, an annual collection of at least 100 new electronic books published by Duke University Press as well as more than 1,500 backlist titles, will move from ebrary to HighWire’s Open Platform and the newly developed Folio ebook solution.

With the launch of the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection on HighWire, Duke University Press’s readers and library subscribers will benefit from HighWire’s long record of innovation and reliability. The integrated platform will connect users with content more effectively by incorporating searching across all of Duke’s publications, not only ebooks but its highly ranked journals as well.

Key features of the e-Duke Books collection on Folio will include a device-friendly reading experience, viewable in PDF and mobile-optimized e-reader formats; toll-free intercontent linked access to cited content also hosted by HighWire, including journal articles from Duke, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications; and increased content granularity for better discovery, sharing, and navigating.

All e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection content will be available on the new platform in December 2013. The current 2013 collection will be unaffected by this change and will continue to be hosted by ebrary through the end of this year. Throughout 2013, e-Duke Books customers will receive frequent communications to ensure a smooth and timely transition. Additional library transition resources, including a growing list of FAQs, are now available here.

Source: Duke University Press

Thomson Reuters Expands Book Citation Index

The IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters announced the expansion of the Book Citation Index through partnerships with publishers such as Elsevier, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the University of Chicago Press. These publishers, among others, will greatly enhance available content in the Index by adding 10,000 books in 2013, increasing the total to nearly 50,000 books from a variety of commercial, nonprofit, and university presses worldwide.

The Book Citation Index, available on the integrated, multidisciplinary citation research service, Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, connects a library’s most impactful books in its collection to powerful new discovery tools, enabling researchers to quickly and easily identify and access the most relevant books in their field. The Index helps users seamlessly search across books, journals, and conference proceedings to discover potential collaborators and glean useful information.

This significant expansion provides greater visibility to authors making meaningful contributions to their fields and enables scholars to navigate from a new starting point. Researchers will now have a richer, expanded view of research within the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Over the course of 2013, users will gain access to nearly 50,000 books and 1 million chapters linked to related journal articles and proceedings indexed within the Web of Knowledge.

Thomson Reuters Book Citation Index comprises scholarly books, both electronic and print, that present fully referenced articles of original research or reviews of the literature, and has been carefully selected based on well-defined criteria to offer the most significant literature in numerous languages. Visit Book Citation Indexfor more information.